Parallel Computing Institute

Parallel@Illinois

Blue Waters Project

The world's first sustained-petascale computational system dedicated to open scientific research will come online at Illinois soon. Blue Waters will sustain performance of at least 1 petaflop on many applications that are crucial to researchers—real-world codes scientists and engineers use every day to simulate things like the weather, the stars, and new medicines. That is more than 1 quadrillion calculations per second. In addition to raw computing power, the project will include intense support for application development, system software development, interactions with business and industry, and educational programs.

This comprehensive approach will ensure that users across the country will be able to use Blue Waters to its fullest potential. A joint effort of the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Cray, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the Great Lakes Consortium for Petascale Computation, Blue Waters is supported by the National Science Foundation.